What are text-based adventure games?
Games told entirely in words, where you act by typing or choosing. A short history, the main kinds you'll find today, and how to get started.
A text-based adventure game describes a world in words and lets you act in it. You read that you are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building, you type enter building, and the game tells you what you find inside. There are no graphics. The pictures are in your head, which is a large part of the appeal.
A short history
The genre starts with Colossal Cave Adventure, written by Will Crowther in the mid-1970s and expanded by Don Woods in 1977. It ran on university mainframes and was shared from computer to computer. A group at MIT played it and built Zork, which became the foundation of Infocom. Through the 1980s Infocom sold text games such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall, known for clever puzzles and witty writing.
Graphics took over the commercial market by the 1990s, but the form never died. Hobbyists kept writing games, held annual competitions and built free tools such as Inform and Twine. Today the community usually calls the whole field interactive fiction.
The main kinds you'll find today
Parser games
The classic style. You type short commands like look, take lantern or go north, and a parser matches them to what the author programmed. They reward careful reading and puzzle solving, and they can be frustrating when the game doesn't know the word you tried.
Choice-based games and gamebooks
Instead of typing, you pick from options at the end of each passage, like the choose-your-own-adventure books many people grew up with. Twine games and visual-novel style stories mostly work this way. They are easy to pick up, but you can only go where the author wrote a path. If that's what you like, see our choose your own adventure games.
MUDs and text RPGs
Multi-user dungeons put many players in one text world with combat, character stats and items. Single-player text RPGs keep the stats and inventory without the crowd. Quillroll's text-based RPG sits in this tradition.
AI text adventures
The newest kind. An AI narrator writes each scene as you play and responds to ordinary sentences instead of a fixed command list. You can try things no author planned for. The downside is that the story is improvised: it can wander or forget details, which good AI games work around by tracking state and summarising what happened.
How to start
- Want to just play? An AI text adventure is the gentlest start: no commands to learn. You can begin one on the Quillroll home page in a few seconds.
- Curious about the classics? The Interactive Fiction Database (ifdb.org) lists thousands of free games with ratings, and many play in the browser.
- Want to write your own? Twine is the easiest tool for choice-based stories; Inform 7 is the standard for parser games.
Tips for your first game
- Read the whole description. Important details are often mentioned once.
- Talk to people and examine things. Text games reward curiosity more than speed.
- In parser games, type help or hint if you're stuck. In AI games, just describe what you want to try.
Questions
What is a text-based adventure game?
A game where the world is described in words and you act by typing commands or choosing options. There are no graphics; the story happens in your head.
What was the first text adventure?
Colossal Cave Adventure, written by Will Crowther in the mid-1970s and expanded by Don Woods in 1977, is generally considered the first.
Is interactive fiction the same thing?
Mostly. Interactive fiction is the wider name the community uses today for text adventures, parser games and choice-based stories.
What is a parser?
The part of a classic text adventure that reads your typed command, such as "take lamp" or "go north". Parser games only understand the verbs and objects they were programmed for.
How are AI text adventures different?
An AI narrator writes the story as you play, so it can respond to almost anything you type, not just a fixed list of commands. The trade-off is that it is improvised rather than carefully authored.
Where can I play one for free?
You can start a free AI text adventure on Quillroll's home page with no download. For hand-written classics, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) lists thousands of free games.